Questions & answers
Straight answers about how CairnVault works, what it costs, and what we can and cannot see.
CairnVault is a digital-legacy vault: you record where your accounts, assets, and final wishes live — encrypted on your own device — so the people you love can find everything when it matters. You build a readable record of your digital and non-digital assets in one quiet evening, and in your absence CairnVault guides your survivors through it.
No — CairnVault is an organizational and communication tool, not legal advice, not a law firm, not a will, and not a substitute for formal estate-planning documents or a qualified attorney. It helps you compile and securely share the information your family will need; for the legal instruments themselves, please consult an estate-planning attorney. See our for the full disclaimer.
No — your vault is encrypted on your device before anything reaches our servers, and the key is never transmitted to us, so we cannot read, search, or interpret its contents. This holds even for CairnVault staff and even in response to a legal demand: we cannot hand over what we cannot read. It is a structural guarantee, not a policy we could switch off.
If you lose both credentials, your vault data is permanently and irrecoverably lost — because we never hold your encryption key, there is no password reset and no account recovery. We recommend storing your Secret Key in a password manager and printing an Emergency Kit to keep somewhere safe, such as with your passport. This is the trade-off for the guarantee that no one but you can read your data.
Your designated contacts hold half of your vault key and CairnVault holds the other half, so neither alone can open your vault. After you pass, your survivors give CairnVault a death certificate; once it is verified, the two halves merge on their own device — never on our servers — to unlock the vault, and CairnVault walks them through your assets step by step.
CairnVault is a one-time $79 to activate your vault, plus an optional $29/yr maintenance plan (about eight cents a day) if you want ongoing updates — there is no subscription trap. You can build your entire plan for free first, with no credit card, and only pay when you are ready to activate it. See the for details.
If CairnVault ever winds the service down, we have committed in our Terms of Service to give you at least six months’ advance notice and a tool to export the complete contents of your plan during that window. Because your vault is encrypted on your own device, at no point — including any wind-down — could we read, sell, or hand your readable information to anyone. See .
Yes — CairnVault is built for exactly the walls that lock families out: the Apple Legacy Contact code (a 13-character string with no code, no access), two-factor codes on a phone your family cannot unlock, and the accounts a password alone will not open. You record where these live and what your family needs, so they are not stranded calling support for eight months.
Yes — part of your inventory is the recurring charges your family would otherwise keep paying, since the average estate has around seventeen still billing a year after death. You record which subscriptions exist and where they bill, so your survivors can find and cancel them instead of discovering them one surprise charge at a time.
No — CairnVault does not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and runs no advertising trackers or behavioral profiling. The only personal data we hold is your email address (to operate your account and send account and release notifications) and the encrypted, unreadable ciphertext of your vault. See our .
Your vault key is derived on your device using Argon2id from your master password and Secret Key, and each item is sealed with XChaCha20-Poly1305 before it is stored. Contact release uses a hybrid X25519 + ML-KEM-768 key exchange — a post-quantum-hardened scheme (NIST FIPS 203) chosen to resist a future quantum adversary. The explains this in plain English.
Yes — you can come back and update your inventory, contacts, and documents at any time. Life changes: accounts open and close, beneficiaries change, and you can keep your vault current whenever you need to.
Email support@cairnvault.app and we will remove your email address and your stored encrypted vault data from our systems. Because the vault is zero-knowledge, deleting it is permanent — there is no way to recover the data afterward.